Review/Art; High and Low Culture Meet on a One-Way Street

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: October 5, 1990

FOR many months and several reasons, ''High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture,'' which opens Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art, has been widely anticipated. Coming after a decade in which fine artists have mixed references to popular culture in new and provocative ways, this show could not have been better timed.

On a broader historical front, the incessant cross-fertilization between 20th-century art and less exalted forms of visual culture has long been known, primarily by its most famous parts - from Picasso and Braque's introduction of Parisian newsprint into their Synthetic Cubist collages, to Roy Lichtenstein's careful croppings and adjusting of ordinary comic-book images for his Pop Art paintings.

A more thorough, egalitarian examination of this vast subject seemed to hold out the tantalizing possibility of a redefinition of modernism, and on the walls of the very institution that helped define its terms in the first place. Finally, as the first large-scale exhibition to be organized by Kirk Varnedoe since he succeeded William S. Rubin in August 1988 as director of the museum's department of painting and sculpture, ''High and Low'' would certainly have much to say about the Modern's future course.

Now, ''High and Low'' is a fact, one that occupies both floors of the Modern's temporary exhibition galleries with more than 250 artworks and related material. Organized by Mr. Varnedoe in concert with Adam Gopnik, the art critic for The New Yorker, it is a big, ambitious show, and it contains many great works of art, some of them juxtaposed in unusual ways with comic-book or advertising images. But the tale this exhibition tells is crushingly familiar, superficial and one-sided, none of which bodes well for the Modern's pre-eminent department under Mr. Varnedoe's stewardship.

At nearly every turn, this exhibition hangs back, seemingly intimidated by the immensity of its subject, setting limits and making excuses and, by and large, simply excerpting past Museum of Modern Art exhibitions. Like the handsome Christian without his Cyrano de Bergerac, it often looks wonderful, but when it opens its mouth, it says little that is original.

It is strange to be so critical of an exhibition that contains Robert Rauschenberg's ''Rebus,'' elements of Claes Oldenburg's ''Store,'' five boxes by Joseph Cornell, 10 portraits by Jean Dubuffet, and substantial groups of work by Cy Twombly and Stuart Davis, as well as more venerable names like Picasso, Braque, Leger, Miro and Duchamp. But, despite its timely concept, ''High and Low'' in actuality is, at best, the wrong exhibition in the wrong place at the wrong time. At worst, it may be a textbook case for the maxim that an exhibition top-heavy in masterpieces can still be a disaster.

Another possible explanation is that the exhibition is virtually impossible to bring off. The curators' thick catalogue oozing facts, reproductions and opinions, some of them quite debatable, is the arena in which the symbiosis of high and low culture is most convincing. Here the four categories of popular culture that Mr. Varnedoe and Mr. Gopnik have staked out - advertising, caricature, the comics and graffiti - are traced back to their historical roots and brought forward in a constant crossfire with their high-art counterparts.

In contrast, the exhibition is plagued by severe, often contradictory limits and goals. In various parts of the catalogue introduction and brochure, the curators avow to bypass a ''full chronicle'' in favor of an exhibition ''whose principal focus is on particular objects and people.'' Just how particular is made ominously clear when they add that their examinations will emphasize events in New York City and Paris, and concentrate on popular culture's interaction with painting and sculpture. Identifying popular culture as ''only a provisional term of convenience,'' they eschew hard and fast categories, seeking to convey the circular exchange in which modern art and popular culture have continuously fed off and redefined each other.

Yet this show, in which text panels announce a new heading or subheading in every gallery, is a hostage to categorization, which accounts for both its abrupt shifts in time and style and its space-devouring repetitions. The well-known road from Paris to New York or, stylistically speaking, from Cubism to Pop is traced not once but twice, in the upper galleries devoted to art and advertising and again in the lower ones, where art and graffiti, caricature and the comics are scrunched together. Proceeding in this manner, ''High and Low,'' reiterates the Modern's chronic biases: a Francophilia that makes short shrift of developments in Italy, Russia and Germany in the first half of the show, and, in the second, a New York centricity that all but ignores postwar Europe. An exception is the opening section of the exhibition's lower tier, which displays the big torn-poster collages of the Parisian ''affichistes,'' Raymond Hain, Jacques de la Villegle and Mimmo Rotella, lifted from the streets of Paris in the early 1960's. Their pieces, not well known in the United States, mark one of the few points where the raw energy of urban life directly enters the show. It would have been exciting to see them beside the efforts of other popular-culture-conscious artists, from Asger Jorn, Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter to David Salle and Julian Schnabel.